Our System Crashed at 14:22: It Wasn't the Database
Our System Crashed at 14:22: It Wasn't the Database TL;DR: During peak concurrent load, our 5-minute cache unexpectedly evicted keys early due to lock contention. The solution was migrating to asynchronous stale-while-revalidate with an in-memory semaphore. The diff took 18 lines and cut our p99 latency from 1.8s down to 240ms. What Broke in Production Last Tuesday, our primary streaming endpoint…
We haven't written up this one. Dev.to has the full story — the link below goes straight to it.
